Meta-Mondrian
May 2026-present.
Mud painting created from samples collected around Peebles Island, Waterford, NY
Installed outside the Rensselaer Astrobiology Research and Education Center!
The Mud Is Alive and Streaming!
Mud was taken from the periphery of Peebles Island where the Mohawk River joins the Hudson River
until I figure out how to embed another page, please visit:
https://019f71bc-5110-4e39-80e1-bd84042bdd9b.share.connect.posit.cloud
So much gratitude to Coburn Wightman for building code and raspberry pi and Brenda Thomson for making it publicly available!
Peebles Island, May 2026
A mud painting is an aestheticized version of a “Winogradsky Column”, a 19th century method for culturing photosynthetic microbes across an oxic-anoxic transect. The first thing I do: collect mud! It was a rainy day in May as I walked all around Peebles Island State Park trying to collect as many different types of soil and water samples to combine in the mix.
Art as Sampling Protocol
Using a 1920’s Port Mondrian painting as a design template, I made a laser cut of the black areas and fit in Rosco light filters for the Red, Yellow and Blue sections. For the grey sections, I ordered the clear film from Rosco as a control, and for the white areas I added nothing.
My goals
1) see if I get differential pigmentation
2) see if microbes can grow in straight lines
3) use art (instead of a computer algorithm) for my random sampling.
I hope the last two items make you smile, bc to me those are both funny!
The Actual Install!
I collected the mud on May 29, 2026.
I installed the mud on May 30, 2026
It is embedded with 8 pH sensors, 8 Eh sensors, 2 CO2 sensors, 2 dissolved oxygen sensors and 1 temperature sensor!
Five Experiments, 2019
A mud painting is an aestheticized version of a “Winogradsky Column”, a 19th century method for culturing photosynthetic microbes across an oxic-anoxic transect. In 2019, I made a mud painting with 5 different experiments.
1) some film from collaborator Araby Kelley to see how it might alter the original footage (it ate it away entirely!)
2) synthetic or natural silk (to see if the biofilm would ‘paint’ it). It did nothing to the synthetic silk and it completely ate up the natural silk
3) pH paper to see if I could ‘watch’ the pH change for the first few days (it got covered with silt - but was the pre-cursor to the pH meter of this current project).
4) fish tanks nutrient meters (also were occluded by silt and were immediately useless - but was the precursor to the other sensors of this current project).
5) an experiment using theater light filters. The result: different light filters selected for different pigmented species depending on the wavelengths that passed thru the light filter. Out of the 5 experiments, this one proved fruitful! I actually had a Coalesce residency in Buffalo NY but it was during covid and I was then 8 hours away and it never got watered and so the experiment was wrecked!
Fun Facts
· The easiest place to study Astrobiology is on planet Earth.
· The earliest lifeforms on Earth are microbes (putatively identified at ~3.8 billion years old).
· On contemporary Earth, microbes have evolved traits to thrive in places that are the coldest/hottest/driest/wettest/saltiest/most acidic/most basic/highest pressure in the sea/lowest pressures on snow-capped mountains, etc. They also live on and in us and all other organisms. They are wonderful!
· They are metabolically skilled to live/evolve across a range of contexts.
· The phototrophic microbes, make pigments (to protect against UV light damage, to fend off other species, to capture light energy), and often work in collaboration with other chemotrophic microbes in diverse ecosystems.
· Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was a Dutch abstract painter: “I wish to approach truth as closely as possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.”